


at least you know you were taken by a pro

by beanarie



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Drug Addiction, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Irene is Moriarty, Non-Consensual Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 13:25:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/761823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanarie/pseuds/beanarie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Moriarty said you was obsessed with puzzles," Moran had said, his eyes shining. "But he's the greatest puzzle you'll ever come across." And through the rage and growing tendrils of doubt, a distant part of Sherlock had laughed. No puzzle could be more challenging or complex than the one these people had taken from him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	at least you know you were taken by a pro

**Author's Note:**

> This was pretty much finished a month ago, bar my obsessive editing process, so it has only an accidental relationship to any spoilers released about the end of the season. Betaed by the lovely [nrem](http://archiveofourown.org/users/night_reveals/pseuds/night_reveals). Heavily inspired by [this amazing concept and art](http://jasjuliet.tumblr.com/post/42968101397/nothing-says-bros-like-helping-your-buddy-go) by [jasjuliet](http://jasjuliet.tumblr.com/) on tumblr. The title comes from the song Driving Sideways by Aimee Mann.

A massive clipper ship sails into New York Harbor. Sherlock divides his attention between that, his buckwheat noodles in lemongrass broth, and then Irene, strolling past the cobblestone street.

He upends the table, leaping over the canvas partition sectioning off the outdoor area of the restaurant. Watson's shout hits his back and dissipates like smoke.

"Sherlock! What are you doing?"

Watson catches up with him three blocks later.

"The hell was that?" she asks, breathing hard. She must have run triple-time after sorting things out with the wait-staff.

He shakes himself. "I have no explanation for that whatsoever," he says. "Sorry."

~

Sherlock occupies a bench overlooking a cricket match in Flushing Meadows Park, letting Teddy go on about a fencer of stolen goods in Woodside. Well, now about the fence's teenaged daughter, but there was some useful information included in the preamble.

"Her name is Claire. Now, I know. Stupid old, right? What were they even thinking? That's a grandma name, not a hot girl's name."

Sherlock brings up Google Maps on his phone, hoping for satellite photos for the exact location Teddy described. "There's something to be said for classics." He smirks slightly. "Theodore."

Teddy is sixteen years old and it is eleven AM on a Thursday. Sherlock is aware that he should be advising the boy to attend school as scheduled. He has learned far too much about the New York City school system to recommend a child spend any more time there than absolutely necessary.

Teddy sucks air through his teeth, his eyes following the batsman. "Thought only Brits played this game. They're Indian."

"Those three-" Sherlock waves his hand at a cluster of players. "Are actually Pakistani. And the wicket-keeper over there-"

"That can't be what it's really called."

"-may identify as South African, considering he was most likely born and raised inside their borders." He mimes throwing a ball. "Bowling technique."

"Yeah, whatever." As Watson approaches, smiling as she shields her eyes from the sun, Teddy grins, showing all of his teeth, and jumps off the bench. "Oh, hey, Miss Watson. You need a new watch?"

"Mine is kind of on its last legs," she admits gamely. "Let's see what you got."

Teddy takes out a velour bag, bringing each model into the light one by one. A dark piece the color of gun metal doesn't stir Sherlock's interest, until he sees the triangle of gems outlining the watch-face. He grabs it out of Teddy's hand.

"Yo, you like that one?"

It's not the same, of course. It's a replica. A crude one, at that. It shares just enough similarities to be recognizable.

Sherlock cracks his neck. Recognizable by _him_. Just like that woman on the street the other day.

"I got like six this morning," Teddy continues. "Only got that one color, but next time I see the guy, I'm gonna ask about-"

Sherlock drops the watch on the ground and steps on it, grinding it into the grass with his heel.

"Holmes, What the _fuck_?"

Sherlock hands Teddy a twenty dollar bill and walks off without meeting anyone's eyes.

~

Alfredo rings from Miami while Sherlock finishes cleaning the windows and moves on to scrubbing the stove. "Looking forward to this wedding," Alfredo says. "My cousin said I'll be sitting with a devout Muslim couple who just had a new baby. We'll be the only group more excited about the coffee than the booze."

"Thoughtful of them," Sherlock says. "Sounds like you're in for a scintillating evening at the non-drinking table, rife with talk of bowel movements and pureed vegetables."

"I could be judgmental like that," Alfredo allows. "But I'd rather find out if they have any thoughts on this passage from the Koran that's been rolling around in my head since my last incarceration."

Sherlock stows the cleaner underneath the sink and wipes his hands on his trousers.

"Something's up," Alfredo says.

Sherlock takes a long breath in through his nose. "Yes." Personally he wouldn't classify going mad as "up", but he'll save the pedantry for another time.

The staccato clomp of platform heels in motion increases in volume down the steps, and Sherlock drums his fingers on the stove. "Watson's returned early," he says. "Have to run."

"Will you talk to her about it?" Alfredo asks.

"I will." Sherlock means to say 'goodbye' or 'enjoy your wedding', but in his mind, he's already moved on. He ends the call, leaving the phone on the counter, and looks toward the steps.

He retreats so hard so fast he cracks his head on the cabinet.

"Yes," Irene says. "I'm really here."

Then she lets three large men in through the back door.

"Remember what I told you," she says. "Gently. Mark him and I mark you."

~

The courtship of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler could have been described as the most protracted session of foreplay in recorded history.

After they met but before they kissed, she made it a practice to send letters. She posted one from Sao Paulo just after a hoax was uncovered about a false heir to a coffee plantation. She sent another from Bern, just after a cache of Nazi gold disappeared. They graced his inbox roughly once a month, seemingly random ruminations on Berlioz, the inner workings of grandfather clocks, Judeo-Christian sculpture versus Greco-Roman. But they were never any of them random. He wasn't bored after one arrived, sometimes for days at a time.

When he found her in front of a post office in Jakarta, she placed the letter directly in his hand.

"Are you going to turn me in to the authorities?" she asked.

He wrinkles his nose. "I doubt that's the way to get you to tell me what you did with that baroness's watch."

"That face." She grabs his chin with a growl. "You are proud of yourself, aren't you?"

"To be perfectly honest, I'm just wondering why we aren't having sex yet."

Later, after they lost some of their jagged edges, two rocks colliding repeatedly until they fit together on one side, she would spend hours in his flat, fingering the edges of the photos, note-cards, and receipts on his wall while she allowed him to air his frustrations and theories about M.

She was always patient, fascinated, even helpful.

~

The woman holds court in his Brooklyn living room. And here's the rub, there is nothing in her he doesn't recognize. He's simply viewing her with a sharper lens this time.

"I knew I was your weakness. I mean, I knew I _was_." She unzips a small black case and lays items out on his table. "I didn't know I was still. What you did to Sebastian, that was such a lovely surprise. I had no idea you were capable of such a thing."

"I want you to tell everyone about me," she says, lifting a syringe. "Irene Adler is alive, Moriarty is a woman, big things happening in New York. The more insistent you are, the more they'll think you mad."

"Irene," he breathes. She creates a tiny pop of vein inside the tattoo on his right bicep. He never left marks before; it would be out of character if he started now.

"Try not to struggle too much," she says. "I mess this up, you'll be bleeding everywhere. Honey, you'll have enough to worry about."

After she empties the syringe into his bloodstream, the henchmen disappear, and she sings to him quietly, something low, sad, and achingly false. And then, then, she lets him fall to the floor. He lands on his stomach, blunt fingernails pressing into the wood paneling.

He can breathe, in and out. His lungs absorb oxygen and expel carbon dioxide. O2. CO2. His fingernails are made of keratin. He once counted the floor boards in this room. He tries to count the grains in the wood now.

She tousles his hair (also made of keratin) and guides him onto his side to mold her body against his. Beyond any sense of wrongness, he can feel how close he is to the edge.

Everything falls away except in, out. O2, CO2.

"Don't go too far," she says. She tugs his ear, pinches his arm, keeping him awake. "Stay with me."

In, out.

In, out.

"Phew, think it's safe to leave you now. Cut it close, didn't we? I imagine your tolerance is a lot lower than it once was."

He rolls onto his back, shivering from the absence of her. She shakes out the throw from the couch, tucks it around his shoulders, and presses her cheek against his with a sigh. His fingers tangle into the short curls at the nape of her neck. Her perfume is the same. "After the smoke clears," she says. "We'll pick a new city to move on to. What do you think?"

If she took him at this very second, he'd go without a single objection.

She floats through the foyer and out the door, and he pulls the blanket over his head.

Some time ago, Sherlock realized his fear of the self-annihilation prophecy following him like a persistent raven didn't have to do with physical death. He has risked his life numerous times, often enthusiastically. Like many addicts, he's fond of more than one type of high, and adrenalin has a lot going for it. The fallout is never fun, but he's accustomed to that. What's always scared him more is the thought of dulling his senses _so_ well he lost them completely. Without his puzzles, without the respect his talents afford him, he's nothing.

"Sherlock?" Watson calls.

Recently he came to understand that he dreaded losing something else.

"Sherlock? Answer me if you're in the house, okay? I'm starting to get a little freaked out here."

He gets his back against his favorite chair, the sound of his heart reverberating through the entire building. There's no telling how much time has passed since Irene left. Doesn't matter; it may as well be fractions of a second. Watson is in the room and she can read him in a glance.

"I couldn't figure out why you would feel the need to apologize to me," she says. The fingers of her left hand curl tighter around her phone. "Maybe I just didn't want to."

A sob gets stuck in his throat. Right now nothing, not one microscopic fiber, separates him from the other weak-willed, recidivist junkies she's dealt with in the past. Irene was right; the truth would only dig him in deeper.

But that doesn't stem the torrent of protests he lets out.

"Shhh," she says, kneeling in front of him. "Calm down." She runs a hand through her hair. "Oh, God. You're so far gone. What _ha_ -" She shakes her head. "I'm calling 911."

He grabs her hand. Her phone should be in her bag. It isn't. There's a reason for that.

At her hiss of pain, he lets go, shrinking away and apologizing again and again. The phone skitters to the floor.

The phone, the phone, the phone.

Watson snaps his name, and he gasps.

Perhaps he has something to say that isn't a rote denial.

"Donna," he says. Donna, the secretary no one noticed. Donna, who thought she could speak with his voice, and Watson saw through it instantly. He pushes on despite Watson's deepening frown. "In- in my humble opinion. _Less than_ \- less than humble opinion. My mistake, see you soon. Donna. Understand. _Donna_."

"You... didn't send me the text," she says softly.

"Understand," he begs. He won't say Irene's name, either of her names, not today. Maybe not for another week. She's still right.

"I do. I understand." Watson's voice cracks. "Sherlock, I swear it'll be okay."

Relief comes over him in a wave, washing away the urgency. He lets his head fall against the seat cushion, and, smiling, closes his eyes.

~

"They used handcuffs," Watson says. "To hold you down."

He says nothing.

"Whoever it was thought the marks would go unnoticed because they knew how much you like them. But here's the thing." She pushes his sleeve up a few inches, running her thumb over a shallow, newly scabbed slice in his skin. "You don't make yourself bleed."

He glances at her hand until she lets him go, then he stares out his bedroom window. "You didn't call the ambulance," he says.

"Your vitals evened out some while you were sleeping. Things got a little less terrifying." Out of the corner of his eye, he can see her wry hint of a smile appear and disappear. "Couldn't help thinking if this went on record, it'd be the end of everything you've worked for here."

"Hm," he says, wrapping his arms tight across his shins.

She lays her hand on his shoulder. "I know you didn't do this to yourself, Sherlock."

 _That's fine_ , his depleted serotonin levels say, _but the next time won't be coerced_. She'll stay for this crisis. Beyond that, who can say? He pushes at his eyes with his fingers, trying, really honestly trying not to compose a text in his head to Teddy's friend Levon, whose older sister occupies a corner in Alphabet City.

Watson proposes they put him on an IV, and he agrees. He went through this before in a hospital, and that was part of it. She calls in a favor, gets all the components for a saline drip delivered to their door. He listlessly tracks her movements from the bed the entire time she sets it up. The second she gets near him with the needle, he reacts so violently it frightens him.

She makes him drink instead. Water, broth, various teas. None of it stays down, but she keeps insisting. At one point he looks down and her feet are dripping red from treading through a pool of blood that only he can see. Every so often he hears the agonized yell Moran let out when Sherlock's screwdriver went through his abdomen.

The light shining in his window transitions to full darkness and back again. Irene never seems to stop singing.

Covering his ears would be useless, since it's all in his head. Because of this he starts tapping just above his ear, a decision that seems to make perfect sense. Soon Watson is holding his wrists together and there's fear in the tightness of her mouth and the wide set of her eyes.

"You can't do that," she says. "What is it? Are you in pain? Talk to me before you start hurting yourself."

"Don't go," he says, rubbing at a sore spot on his head.

"I'm not," she promises, simultaneously validating and dismissing his fears, effortless, like she's had to say this more than once before.

"My brother left," he says. "Did you talk to him?"

"Sherlock," she says, swallowing heavily.

Watson reads aloud, scholarly articles about every topic under the sun interspersed with movie reviews and her favorite chapters of To Kill a Mockingbird.

His hand hangs over the bed, plucking at the sheet until the edges are threadbare and riddled with holes. She moves her chair closer, entwines her fingers with his, and picks the sentence back up from where she left off.

~

Sherlock wrinkles his nose at the congealing contents of the bowl, less out of any sense of distaste and more because it feels like something he would have done, before. He is sitting at the kitchen table, wearing four shirts and a blanket, his hair damp from the shower.

"That oatmeal is steel-cut," Watson says from the sink, employing a bright, brittle optimism that only she seems able to pull off. "I don't actually remember why that makes a difference, but it does, somehow." She gestures with the wet sponge, soap suds flying from her fingers. "Go on. We need to get you back up to fighting weight."

"This is food for the infirm," he says hoarsely. He picks up his mug of tea, and the aroma is so strong it makes his stomach clench. He puts it back down without drinking.

"Okay." She places one hand on her hip. "Put your shoes on and your coat. I'll find out if that Argentinean steak house on Henry Street takes walk-ins."

He shows her the back of two fingers. She responds in kind, flipping him off. As she approaches, swapping his tea for a glass of milk, the creases around her eyes and across her forehead appear to have lightened somewhat.

"Thank you, Watson," he says, stirring his oatmeal.

Her eyes remain fixed on his back, the sensation making his shoulder-blades meet in the middle. "I don't know if this is the right time, but-" She wipes her hands on her shirt. "You knew your attacker."

"Did I?" he says.

"The Sherlock I know would have started trying to find his attempted murderer the instant he became lucid again."

He taps the side of his nose. Not the man she knew, not _entirely_ lucid. His thoughts create a loud buzz at his ear and fly off, slow enough for him to watch them go but too fast for him to catch hold. The only consistent thread is the regular reminder that if he took a little, just enough to alleviate the depression, the insomnia, the goddamn migraine, he'd be able to function again.

"There's something so off about this whole thing." Watson takes the other seat at the table. "Sherlock, I think you're reeling. Not just because of what was done to you, but because of who did it."

For a long moment, Sherlock scrapes grains from the side of his bowl and lets her scrutinize him.

She tilts her head. "Do you want to go back to Hemdale?" Her sincerity makes it sound like a viable option rather than a judgment. "If that's what you need, I'll get a car and drive you up there today."

"And become one of the untold millions for whom drug rehab did not work the first time," he says tonelessly.

Joan lays her hand across his wrist. "It'd make you less of a statistic if you choose not to get help?" He's only ever been as opaque as glass to her, so she sees what he's doing. Arguing takes little energy and even less brain-power. And it allows him to pretend his fate matters to him. She's pushing back anyway, just in case some part of him might need to hear what she's saying. She nudges the bowl a few millimeters closer to him and goes back to the sink. "Think about it, okay?"

"We could keep up the investigation on two fronts," she continues over the sound of running water. "I'd come by on visiting days, keep you updated about evidence, leads."

"What investigation."

The discordant twang of something metallic hitting the sink echoes through the kitchen, and he turns to look at Watson. Her elbow rests on the edge of the sink, her hand clenched in her hair. "This person came very close to killing you," she says. He doubts she's slept more than three hours in as many days. "Here, in our house. They may have- You're not ready to get angry about that, I understand. But, I'm sorry, I am."

He picks up his spoon, a sudden inspiration stopping it halfway to his mouth. "I won't use the phone," he offers. She blinks at him and he lifts a shoulder, shuffling the blanket. He could promise, but that additional word wouldn't make much difference.

"I- I could go for a run," she says. There's a fuzzy sort of question mark on the end that he ignores. "Just for thirty minutes or so."

"Think I'll try and sleep again," he says. He downs a spoonful of oatmeal.

"That's not a bad idea," she says, taking a half step forward and back. "Get rid of as much of that as you can first, okay?"

He gives a quiet grunt to satisfy her need for a response. She nods, lingering, but eventually she takes the stairs, leaving him with the silence.

 _Big things happening in New York_ , Irene had said. He should care about that, shouldn't he?

He digs into his temple with the heel of his hand, letting time tick away. The answer is going to have to present itself. He isn't up for actively searching.

An image swirls into focus. Black denim trousers, those of Irene's lackey, stained at the hem. Some type of reddish dust or dirt.

He finds a pad of paper and writes that down, adding a rough sketch in case he should lose the mental image in the near future. In the time it takes him to empty a third of the oatmeal, he's remembered two more details, possible clues. He writes them down as well and tears off the page to leave on the kitchen table.

Watson will see that when she returns.

The desire to climb his way out and stay out, he can't hinge that on her. He knows this. That way leads to everything he remembers not wanting for himself. This is only hinge-adjacent. He's merely borrowing a little motivation from her while his own is being replenished. It will come back.

He nods to himself, dropping the bowl in the sink and taking the notepad with him to his room. It will come back.


End file.
